Most businesses realize that accurate, relevant and representative market analysis is key to increasing revenue. Market analysis can provide information about a business' customers as well as its own business model. Additionally, a business may use market analysis to learn more about customers and business models of its competitors. As such, market analysis can enable businesses to make more intelligent advertising, marketing, design and other important business decisions.
Although accurate, relevant and representative market analysis is desirable, it is not yet available for the wireless voice industry. Conventional methods of collecting wireless voice information (e.g., voice usage, voice charges, voice plan information, etc.) include performing phone surveys and manual collection and scraping of paper bills, which both present accuracy, standardization, and scaling issues. For example, phone surveys require calling individual subscribers and asking for voice information from a recent wireless bill. This method creates accuracy issues given the reliance on the subscriber to view and convey the information. Also, phone surveys are inconvenient and time consuming for both the surveyor and subscriber being surveyed, thereby limiting the amount of information that can be obtained at any time. Additionally, given the inconvenience to the subscriber and the time and cost expended to conduct the surveys, it is hard to obtain scalable information (e.g., from a large number of survey participants) necessary to produce relevant and representative market analysis. Thus, conventional methods fail to accumulate accurate, relevant and representative wireless voice information for market analysis.
Another conventional method used to obtain voice information involves collecting wireless bills in hard-copy form, and manually reviewing and scraping the information from the paper bills. The accuracy and effectiveness of this method is also questionable provided participants may not mail their complete bill for review. Additionally, the time spent reviewing the information on the paper bills prevents the accumulation of sufficient information to provide relevant and representative market information. Thus, conventional methods fail to accumulate accurate, relevant and representative wireless voice information for market analysis.